We are lonely.

This is not a statement I am deducing on my own, or that I am projecting onto all of you from my own bedfellowing with loneliness. Recent study after study has shown that social networking and this strange new ability to stay digitally connected to other people at all times of the day or night are making us (as individuals within a society) far more lonely than we ever have been in all of history.

For example… I went bowling a little while back with three friends. I hate bowling. I just suck at it. I can’t not throw the ball twenty feet in the air when I bowl. I’m guessing it’s because of my humongous stature and my glorious gorilla arms. But, these three friends wanted to go, so I swallowed my hatred for the sport, and away to the bowling alley we went. These were good friends. Really good friends, actually. And they were also friends I hadn’t hung out with in quite some time so I was pretty excited about seeing them.

About half way through the game, a miracle happened. The heavens opened, light shone down around our lane, some invisible force carried my bowling ball after I gorilla-arm lobbed it through the air, and… a STRIKE! I couldn’t believe it! I realized I might actually break 50 points on that game (if you don’t bowl, that ain’t good, trust me)!

I turned around with hands raised high in the air, ready to receive a first-rate barrage of high-fives just as I had previously been giving to my buddies for every strike knocked down in our game thus far. Instead, all three friends had their faces buried in their phones. No one had seen my strike. No one saw me standing with arms stretched high. Eventually I dropped my arms and kicked one friend in the shoe as I told him, “your turn.”

I was there that night with three close friends. And you know what? I was lonely in that moment. I was lonely most of that night. I am sure all of you have had similar moments recently. I am sure I have been the one buried in my own phone making other people feel lonely while I was absorbed in the far away digital world.

My friends, we are failing to remember the very real people sitting, and laughing, and doing things with us. We have an addiction which makes us chase that which isn’t real while negating that which most definitely is. We feel some sort of amazing rush when 10 people we barely know hit like or comment on pictures of what we’re doing with the people we’re with, than we are with actually doing what we’re doing and enjoying those people while we’re with them! I am not preaching here. I have done it as much as anyone else.

And nowhere is this as prevalent as it is in the dating world right now.

That rush we get with social networking? That validation we receive? That dopamine spike we experience when other people like or comment on our stuff? It all becomes greatly amplified in the dating world because in the dating world we’re getting likes and comments, but those likes and comments specifically are playing leapfrog with the more lonely parts of our minds. The lonelier we feel, the more it feels so good to have a constant barrage of strangers flirt back, or show interest, or like the photos we have posted, or comment on our dating profiles. We find ourselves constantly checking the inboxes of our dating websites and apps, even when we have no one we’re particularly interested in hearing from. We find ourselves giddy when a notification pops up on our phones after something (anything) has happened inside these things.

And because of that, dating has so quickly become so muddled, and so tricky, and so lonely, that we have to do something, and we have to do something fast, if we are going to save it.

Read Also

How a Meddling Mother Nearly Ruined My Marriage

How We Rebuilt Our Marriage Through Therapy

Saving a Marriage After an Affair

Can Marriage Survive Infidelity?

Is Your Marriage a Partnership or a Prison?

Keep Him From Walking Out That Door

Managing Expectations in Dating

Why I Believe In Marriage

Dating Advice From Happily Married Couples

The Man or the Money

Walk Away From Parental Control in Relationships

When You’re Stuck in the “Casual Dating” Zone

A Necessary Courtesy or Just Overkill in Online Dating?

Loneliness is a really crappy feeling. Really crappy. Feeling lonely makes it difficult to be productive. It makes it difficult to make proper and healthy life decisions. It often makes it difficult to live healthy physical lifestyles. For some it makes sleep difficult. For others it affects work and livelihood. It affects self-esteem and confidence. Fixing loneliness is a far greater need within most of us than almost anything else will be, so other important parts of life and other relationships get neglected, or they get thrown under the bus altogether. We have started combatting loneliness with new and exciting ideas, mixed with technology, and we actually end up making our loneliness worse.

Much worse.

And I think Tinder is the number one biggest of those exciting ideas mixed with technology.

For those of you not in the dating game (and it is a very real game nowadays, I assure you), let me explain what Tinder is. I use it. I love it. I have met so many great people through it. Tinder is an app which lets people post up to six Facebook photos of themselves and a short block of text to sell others on why they are awesome. It then shows you potential matches based on your location, gender, and age preferences. There is no other filtering. Very simple concept, really.

You then go, rapidly, from profile to profile and you swipe either left or right. If you swipe left, you are telling Tinder you are not interested in that person. You likely will never see them again on the app (we all know that panic as we accidentally swipe someone amazing away forever). If you swipe right, you are telling Tinder you are interested in that person and, well, one of two things happens. If that person also swipes right on you (shows interest), Tinder notifies you and lets you start chatting with each other in a private texting environment. If that person swipes left on you… Sorry, Charlie. Gone forever as well.

Some people use Tinder to make friends. Most use it to find people to date. Some people use it to find hookups and one night stands. You get what you set out to get on Tinder, and most single people younger than 50 nowadays use it, even though they have such a love-hate relationship with it.

And while people use it with different end goals, what everyone uses it for is its never-ending (and I mean never-ending) value-menu of potential people. Rarely a day goes by when Tinder doesn’t show me at least 50-100 new women to let me swipe left or right through, all within a 20 mile radius of where I’ve currently got my butt parked.

In a lot of ways it is incredible and fun. Tinder is more like the old fashioned “meet someone at a party” concept than anything else I’ve seen. I mean, if I’m at a party or a social gathering, I scope the room, I look at all the potentials, and I decide on the ones I’m most attracted to and whom I think I’d have a real chance with (a delicate balance we all must learn). It starts at a very superficial level, which is okay. Everyone has different people that they’re attracted to, so it works. And at the party, I go introduce myself to them. I hopefully strike up good conversation and end up with someone’s number.

But here is where Tinder is different and, in my opinion, extremely detrimental to dating as a whole…

When I am at a social gathering or party, I will go from potential person to potential person, mingling, talking, and having fun. But when I make a very real connection with one of them, I end up hanging out with them a lot, often for the brunt of the evening. We exchange numbers, we pursue each other, we date, and we see where it goes before we go to the next social gathering and start scoping the room and looking at new potentials. I do not meet a woman at a get-together with whom I have a fantastic connection, spend the evening enjoying her company, and immediately go to another party and look for more fantastic connections in case she is a no-go.

But that is precisely what we do on Tinder (and other dating websites and apps). We meet people in real life who we met through the app (these services are great for that), we make fantastic and real connections, and then when it’s over, we go home and we open our Tinder apps as soon as we walk in the door. We swipe left or right on more, new, and different people. We keep our dating pools ever-growing. For goodness sakes. Sometimes we even do it in the bathroom while we’re on our dates.

Hell. Sometimes we do it right in front of our dates (it has happened to me, more than once, I assure you)!

We are lonely.

We also want love. We want connections. We want relationships. We want to not feel lonely. But…

We have begun looking at the very real people sitting in front of us as completely disposable. We have begun scrutinizing them much more heavily and looking for every reason to bail on the idea of that person. We have begun believing that there is little special about anyone anymore because… THERE ARE SO MANY PEOPLE LITERALLY AT OUR FINGERTIPS.

We have begun looking for and wanting something we think is “perfect” instead of doing what humans have always done which is to look at potential romantic partners with eyes partially shut since we have always known that all people have their flaws and we need to get comfortable with those flaws if we want to not be lonely. But we can’t do that anymore. We don’t let ourselves do that anymore. Not when we have a hundred more matches sitting in our pocket, a dozen other conversations currently going, and four more dates on the verge of being lined up. We don’t give a lot of potentially great second dates chances to stick around long enough to let ourselves see past their faults and discover their amazing quirks because we somehow believe that someone better is never more than a finger swipe away.

And even worse is how much less we work at our budding relationships now when we do find them. We do not feel the same urgency to keep our relationships healthy and strong when they start going South. We do not put in the same work that has to be done to make them flourish anymore. Not like we used to. And why would we? If this current relationship of mine ends, I can easily swipe fifty more women in ten minutes and find someone better than you. I can easily get on a dating website and search for someone better than you. I don’t have to make this work, because there will always be someone better than you. Right? I mean, isn’t that what we’re saying?

Sigh.

And we wonder why we’re suddenly lonely and getting lonelier. We wonder why so many people are starting to give up on the idea of relationships and love even in the weight of their loneliness. We wonder why attachments aren’t happening like they used to. We wonder why we are so easily thrown to the wolves in the dating world. We react to this new phenomenon in the dating game by making things harder for ourselves and for those we once could have so easily loved. We scratch our heads and never take time to realize that… We are doing this to ourselves. And we can fix it.

2025.

This is the year we should take dating back! This is the year we must take dating back. I sincerely fear that with the rate the dating scene is devolving, 2026 might be too late.

Should we all immediately get off of Tinder? Heavens, no. I love Tinder. I have many great friends and have dated amazing people from Tinder. Same with Match. Same with other services. These really are great ways to meet new people. And aren’t people just people no matter where we meet them? Getting rid of these things is not the answer, especially when we have made ourselves socially awkward as a whole in recent years to where the art of meeting and finding people at social gatherings and at coffee shops is becoming more difficult thanks to our reliance on social media and our now extremely rusty “talk to real people” skills. The answer to this problem is definitely not to get rid of the services we have come to love.

It is actually much more simple than that. The answer is getting rid of them once a real connection has been made. Shut them off. Delete them for a while.

Yes. The answer is removing Tinder, or Match, or Loveawake, or (fill in the blank) from our phones the moment we walk away from an amazing first date with someone, no matter how many people and potentials are still there in the wings.

The answer is to believe that the people sitting in front of us might just be amazing, and beautiful, and good enough, the way we did before smart phones and before the Internet.

The answer is to follow through on our crushes, and to do brave things that scare us because we fear losing someone, and to be romantic and wooing and amazing to that one person before we muddy it all up by always keeping ten more people in our pockets, just in case.

The answer is to shout the words, “damn any rejection! I’m going for this one!” and to have the faith that if we do it, the other person will, too.

The answer is to learn how to validate ourselves with the flirtations, and the smiles, and the warm touches of the people physically sitting in front of us, instead of by all the people who are sitting in our inboxes judging us based on only a few pictures they get to see and the perfect slice of life we tend to offer them.

The answer is to look for all the wonderful, and incredible, and strong parts of the person sitting across from us, instead of for every possible red flag, and every bit of baggage, and every way we know it won’t work since someone, surely, inside our phones right now might just be better. Someone else in our phones might just be… perfect.

The answer, my friends, is to trust the longer-term potential of real people we meet more. Not less.

We can take dating back.

In fact, dating can be better than ever because meeting people is easier than ever! Let’s just do ourselves a favor and give ourselves a fighting chance here. If we don’t, we will forget how to do it anymore, and true companionship will be something found only in discussions of what once was. And I don’t want that. Loneliness is, after all, a really crappy feeling.